“I didn't plan to record only songs by female singers. I just picked songs that I really love,” said popular jazz singer Youn Sun Nah of her newest album, Elles.

As temperatures drop here in NYC, they’re rising in Rio. Coincidentally, this month a scad of new releases from here and abroad conjure all the excitement of Brazil’s rich vocal jazz tradition.

You don't have to be a composer to play jazz. But what is a composition if not an improvisation in slow motion? Maybe it’d also be appropriate to describe jazz as “composition in real time.” If so, doesn’t this suggest that all jazz musicians are composers?

The first meeting of minds between bassist/singer esperanza spalding and Milton Nascimento was in 2010, when the music legend appeared on spaldings’s third-stream marvel, Chamber Music Society (Concord).

It’s hard to keep up with singer Alexis Cole. She lives in New York City but is almost constantly on the road or in the air: Her formidable career has found her studying voice in India, busking throughout Europe, teaching jazz in Ecuador, gigging solo in Japan, and fronting West Point’s touring big band, The Jazz Knights, for six years. Clichés about jazz ambassadorships aside, Cole’s captivating musicality would go a long way to bridge international divides—she’s a most winning representative of our uniquely American art form.

UK singer Norma Winstone took the title of her new album, Outpost of Dreams, from the first piece that she and pianist Kit Downes had ever written together—his music, her lyrics.

In a phone chat with Downbeat, bandleader Sullivan Fortner reveals what makes his latest ensemble with bassist Tyrone Allen and drummer Kayvon Gordon so exceptional.

Leader and singer Catherine Russell first worked with uber-talented pianist Sean Mason on her 2022 release for Dot Time Records, Send For Me. This wonderful album was a big affair, with horns and reeds and hand percussion complementing Russell’s superlative vocal performance. For her latest project with Mason, though, she’s opting for the most reduced of settings—just voice and piano. This record, My Ideal , represents Russell’s first complete foray into voice-piano duets.  

Laufey’s commanding rise to stardom has happened uncommonly quickly.

In the six decades that the Grammy for Best New Artist has been on offer, arguably only two jazz vocalists have ever taken it home. Esperanza spalding was the first, and Samara Joy the second.    

During the 2010s, John Dokes was the regular front man for the George Gee Swing Orchestra, the de facto house band at Swing46 for the last 20 years.  It’s hard to imagine a more apt setting for the smooth baritone, just as it’s hard to avoid favorable comparisons to Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, and other charismatic crooners whose contributions to the vocal canon readily bridge any gap between jazz and traditional pop.  

Jeremy Pelt’s latest record, Tomorrow’s Another Day, marks a “departure from what people have known me to be,” the prolific trumpeter writes. This departure doesn’t alter his approach to performance—his exquisite playing is still the focal point of each tune. Rather, he experiments here with sonic design, shaking up the usual instrumentation, form, and tenor of his compositions.

Brazilian vocalist Jamile Staevie Ayres gracefully shoulders the full weight of the sung poetry for composer/bandleader Mike Holober’s This Rock We’re On: Imaginary Letters (Palmetto Records).

What Hilary Gardner wanted most growing up was to move to New York City and sing jazz. But she lived in a small town in rural Alaska, and “the first music I ever got paid to sing was Patsy Cline covers at dive bars,” she revealed to the sold-out room at Manhattan’s Birdland Theater on March 3rd.

Composer Maria Schneider opened the sleek black box and placed it on a coffee table in her Manhattan apartment. Inside lay the vinyl LPs comprising Decades, her new compilation release, with each of the three discs tucked into its own brightly colored jacket. As deliciously rich as this packaging is, it only begins to tell the story of Schneider’s formidable contributions to jazz.  

Singer-songwriter Norah Jones titled her newest LP Visions after those bouncing, hypnogogic impressions that thwart sleep. Its appeal derives from Jones’ dream-inspired musical imaginings.

Each of the 18 instrumental tracks on pianist Sullivan Fortner’s new album Solo Game (ARTR) was a first take—with no second takes, says Fred Hersch, Fortner’s former mentor and one of the album’s producers, in the audio liner notes. Such finesse in the studio requires extreme technical prowess, yes—but it also demands a limitless wealth of improvisational ideas. In this, Fortner has few peers.

Australian composer/arranger Myles Wright chose the repertoire for his latest self-produced release, Gamer, with particular care. He was adapting classic gaming soundtracks for jazz orchestra and these tunes, though utterly captivating, didn’t always translate easily into the modern jazz vernacular.

“I’ve been writing forever, but this album is my real birth as a songwriter,” writes Dominican/French jazz singer Cyrille Aimée in the notes for A Fleur de Peau, her Whirlwind debut released last month. The album represents a departure for Aimée, not just for its originality and new business relationship, but for its personal backstory and strong message.

Moor Mother says a lot with just a few words: In a mere nine tracks she manages to encapsulate the centuries-long reckoning between the British monarchy and the millions of people it enslaved. On The Great Bailout, Moor Mother’s ninth studio album, this reckoning is more than a poetic revelation, though it is that, too. It’s a veritable tally of the costs—physical, psychological, perpetual—exacted by the Atlantic slave trade.